The Case of Mary Bell by Gitta Sereny

In 1968, Mary Bell, then 11 years old, and Norma Bell, thirteen years old and no relation, stood trial for the murders of two little boys in Newcastle. Their trial took place in adult court and their names were released to the press to prevent the possibility of rumours spreading locally about other children. Thus Mary Bell became a notorious child-murderer before she reached puberty. A narrative soon developed around the trial and the crime, a narrative that remains to some extent intact to this day, which held that Norma Bell was an easily-led child of sub-average intelligence, while Mary Bell, far more intelligent, was an aberration, a fiend, an inexplicably evil monster.

Gitta Sereny's book, first published in the years immediately following the case, seeks above all to reject this concept of the evil seed, and argues that no trial of a child who has killed is morally worthwhile unless it seeks to understand not only what happened, but also why it happened. Perhaps, she suggests, greater understanding might prevent such a thing happening again. It might also help society understand how to deal with young people like Mary Bell, who are, on the evidence of their actions alone, deeply disturbed.

Sereny has worked with disturbed children. She writes generously and compassionately about everyone involved, and writes from a belief in the need for serious reform of the justice and social service systems. But the truth is also that Mary Bell is endlessly fascinating, and it would be facile to pretend that this doesn't account for part of the book's great appeal. She is simultaneously terrifying, confusing and endearing, and many people who had contact with her in the years this book recounts spoke of the inexplicable hold she could have over a person, and of the complex emotional reactions she awoke in those who were charged with dealing with her. Reading this book, one experiences a similar mix of emotions and unlikely attachment to the child murderer.

The book begins with the events of the summer when the killing occurred, and any discussion of the subject probably requires a quick explication of those events:

On 11th May 1968, Mary and her friend Norma "found" Mary's cousin injured and bleeding behind some sheds. They came to his aid and were later asked to give statements to the police.

The following day, a local mother complained that Norma and Mary Bell had assaulted her three daughters in the local nursery's sandpit, leaving visible marks on the neck of her seven-year-old. The two girls again gave statements to the police. These statements are reproduced in the book. In Norma's account Mary asks one of the children, "Do you know Mary Bell?" and when the the girl replies, "You are Mary Bell," she says, "No I'm not. Can you fight Mary Bell?" She then asks, "What happens if you choke someone, do they die?" and then begins to strangle the girl until the child turns purple. Norma ends her account by saying that she is no longer Mary's friend. What is disturbing though is that Mary's own account is almost identical to begin with, except that she has Norma asking, "Do you know Mary Bell," and then saying, "Do you wish Mary Bell was dead?" Mary then claims she went behind the shed from where she couldn't see what happened next, but from where she did hear some screaming.

On the 25th of the same month, Martin Brown, four years and two months old, was found dead in an abandoned building. Mary and Norma were observed near the scene and they tried to enter the room where he was found. The cause of death was unclear. The policeman working on the case considered asphyxiation as a cause, but dismissed this because Martin's throat was unmarked. (While it is possible to strangle a four-year-old without leaving a mark, explains Sereny, an adult will almost always apply unnecessary force and cause lasting discoloration or damage.) The following day, the local nursery building was broken into and vandalised. Weird notes were found inside, scrawled in childish writing. They read as oblique confessions to the murder but were dismissed as a tasteless prank. The following week Mary Bell and Norma were arrested breaking into the same nursery.

In the meantime, Mary Bell knocked on the door of Martin's house and asked his mum, smiling, if she could see Martin. "Oh, love," said Martin's Mum, "he's dead." Mary, still smiling, said that she knew he was dead. "I wanted to see him in his coffin," she explained. Later in the book, Gitta Sereny discusses the diagnosis of two examining psychologists who stated that Mary Bell was suffering from a psychopathic personality. For me, even as an interested layman, this early incident was a clue that Mary was a psychopath. It also seems that she wanted to get caught. That same week she told other children that she was a murderer and had murdered Martin Brown. Sereny sees all this acting-out as a series of cries for help, which, had they not been ignored, might have prevented what happened next.

Almost exactly two months after the death of Martin Brown, Brian Howe, a child of less than three and a half years old, was found murdered in some waste ground not far from where Mary and Norma lived. Mary and Norma were interviewed several times. Mary called attention to herself by trying to implicate an innocent boy who often played with Brian. Norma eventually implicated Mary, who then accused Norma of the murder.

Having laid these events out in detail, the book goes on to deal with the two girls' time on remand and with the trial. Sereny discusses how the trial was adapted to fit the requirements of two very young girls, how everyone involved did their very best, but how ultimately they were hamstrung by the structure of a criminal trial designed for trying adult defendants, which may not in the end have benefited anyone. Throughout the process, Norma was emotional and childlike, while Mary Bell seemed composed, except when she grew angry. Faced, as an eleven year old, with impossibly complex legal jargon, she nonetheless followed the trial and carefully adapted her account of events to incorporate plausible explanations for evidence she had heard presented against her. She was often blank-faced and was able to discuss topics like murder and death without apparent concern. Sereny points out, though, that all Mary's anxiety was visible in her hands. She constantly made weird gestures and stretched her fingers apart. Mary's vocabulary was also very advanced for her age, and her ability to keep track of the discussion uncanny. She was able to confuse and get the better of her interrogators on more than one occasion. All this ultimately worked against her though, since it supported the idea that she was the instigator and Norma was merely a stooge. Mary alone was convicted. What was completely absent from the trial, and this is why Sereny says she felt compelled to write the book, was any discussion of either girl's background.

And this aspect of the case was not missing only from the trial. For many years Mary's childhood experiences were not known to her carers, and despite being diagnosed as "of unsound mind," she was given little or no psychiatric treatment. Sereny would later write a whole book, Cries Unheard, about Mary Bell's childhood, a book that exposes unsuspected levels of abuse, but even the single chapter of The Case of Mary Bell dedicated to the topic makes it clear that Mary's mother, Betty Bell, was a very unwell woman from very early in her life. Had Betty received psychiatric intervention, or had Mary been removed from her care, argues Sereny, perhaps the damage could have been greatly reduced all round. Sereny is polemical about the need to separate children from unfit parents, a position which might seem controversial until you know that Betty tried to kill Mary Bell on at least four occasions.

Just as there was a lack of medical expertise or psychiatric intervention in Betty's life, so there was for a long time no medical dimension to Mary Bell's captivity. This was a girl in serious need of treatment which, for a long time, she did not receive. Those who dealt with Mary were often dedicated and enthusiastic, but Sereny argues that they needed the support of psychiatrists and psychologists; support which simply was not there. In fact, the ignorance of those with responsibility for the child seems shocking. Sereny discusses more than once Mary's ability to make her adult carers feel they had some kind of special connection with her, some affinity nobody else had. In detention, at least one of Bell's mentors had to resign after becoming convinced Bell was innocent. Several others were unable to cope with Mary's rejection of them. Her mother was allowed visitation rights, despite being the source of many of her mental issues, and was even allowed to photograph Mary in her underwear. The institution where she was held believed they were "doing miracles" with Mary, even as two batches of hamsters died in her care from neck-related injuries. 

The Case of Mary Bell was reprinted in the 1990s, following the death of James Bulger at the hands of John Venables and Robert Thompson. Appended to this later edition is Gitta Sereny's account of the trial faced by Venables and Thompson, which again took place in adult court. To some readers this addition might feel a little exploitative, as if the aim were to resurrect the Mary Bell book with the addition of contemporary material related to a completely separate crime to give it relevance. And to a certain degree I sympathise with this idea, because the two cases are strikingly different in at least as many ways as they are similar. The core ideas of Sereny's argument are, however, relevant to both trials, and it's instructive to see how little had changed in the intervening two and a half decades. More than this though, the Bulger case highlights the destructive consequences of the justice system's disinterest in the motivations and reasons for this kind of crime.

Sereny contends that the murder of Jamie Bulger was a sex crime, and that until this was understood, very little of value could come from the proceedings. The behaviour of the boys during questioning, especially in relation to the batteries found near Bulger's body, supported a sexual motive from early on. It was eventually established that the two killers had forced the batteries into Bulger's mouth—a behaviour which Sereny claims is almost always a sexual act in children. The sexual nature of the crime was in fact clear to the police, but it was felt that discussion of this aspect of the boys' actions would cause only unnecessary distress. Sereny suggests that without taking all this into account, and with no attempt to understand the two boys' backgrounds, the best we can hope for from legal proceedings is a punitive custodial sentence, which might well be necessary, but should be regarded as the absolute minimum response to such a crime.

The second edition of The Case of Mary Bell was published in 1998, and when the two boys were eventually released, sure enough, one of them was sent back to prison for reoffending. It's interesting to note that while Sereny and others suggested that Robert Thompson, who was likely sexually abused himself, probably instigated the sexual element of the original crime, it was in fact John Venables who ended up getting sent back inside for child porn offences. Perhaps Sereny misunderstood the dynamic of the crime, or perhaps Venables' sexual development was stunted by the traumatic crime he committed as a young boy, or by his being condemned to negotiate puberty and the journey into adulthood in a punitive institution.

Either way, the addition to the book of the Bulger material was tragically vindicated by this turn of events and further underlines the key message that Mary Bell was not an aberrant, evil soul, but a vulnerable child damaged by an appalling formative situation.

The girl that emerges through the pages of this book is intelligent, manipulative, strange and impossible to fully understand. She is emblematic of the total failure of society to grasp either the causes of violence or the best approach to dealing with child offenders. The Case of Mary Bell strongly rejects the mainstream discourse around "evil" children, which tends to suggest that we should save our compassion for the victims of murder and for their families. This is a story full of victims, it argues, all of whom deserve our compassion.